


The Ache of You (Beneath My Skin)

by Cupcakemolotov



Series: melody of stardust [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 10:19:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9230621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cupcakemolotov/pseuds/Cupcakemolotov
Summary: Surviving isn't just existing, its living. Jyn tries to figure that out.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't been super strict with the timeline for this, and I'm just going to apologize in advance and ignore it. This follows the previous drabble "Trust Goes Both Ways" but you don't need to read it to understand this one at all.

Hoth was a frozen hell.

The first few days Jyn had spent in its icy corridors, shivering until she'd have sworn her teeth had cracked, she'd welcomed the discomfort. The cold seemed like penance for her audacity to live. She'd laid in her bunk, wrapped in every piece of clothing she’d been given, her thin pillow pulled over her head, knees tucked into her chin, and she’d counted her breaths until her fingers and toes thawed.

It was taking less time each night, generators and sheer determination turning the base into something livable. Each day was a slow grind, the low impact work Jyn did as mindless as the rest of her was numb. She'd gotten good at catching sleep where she could, and so she dozed in snatches, never quite drifting off, unwilling to face her nightmares. Eventually, exhaustion would catch up and she'd wake frozen in her bed, limbs locked in silent horror, her mind's betrayal harsh in her throat.

But if the nightmares weren't getting better, they were becoming familiar and no longer did she press her face into her blankets to muffle her tears. She hadn't cried since Saw had abandoned her at sixteen. She’d stood drenched and angry, with her tears locked somewhere she couldn't reach them, after Eadu. But her first nightmare after Scarif, Cassian's blood still a warm memory on her lips, and she'd cried like a child.

Her last clear memory of Cassian was of a face pale with exhaustion and blood loss, the way his fingers had slipped away from the cuff of her jacket as he collapsed. Her dizzy panic and desperate calls as she crashed to the ground next him, vision greying due to her own injuries. She’d woken alone, the only tangible memory that everything hadn't been a nightmare was the necklace around her throat and the lingering ache in her ankle she couldn't shake.

Cassian was alive, but no one would tell her more. Bodhi was a name no one knew, demands for the pilot’s status falling on deaf ears. It wasn't that they were unsympathetic, but she wasn't one of them. For someone who had spent a lifetime not belonging, she'd never resented it so thoroughly.

But Jyn was nothing but stubborn, and so she'd set her teeth and locked away the rage and impotent frustration that got her nowhere. Saw had taught her to hold, until the damn broke and she couldn't hold anymore. How to tie up her emotions, lock them away and face what she could and slowly chop away at the things she couldn't.

But Jyn hadn't realized how much of herself she was pushing down and out, until she saw Bodhi.

Perhaps it would be best to say that Bodhi had found her, hobbling on a healing leg so similar to her own, face tired and worn and hollow at the edges. But his fingers had been warm as he grasped her hand, lips compressed for a long second as he breathed. Almost as if he'd needed to see her, to know that she was real.

_I'm the pilot._

“They said you were okay,” Bodhi murmured finally, eyes skating across her face as he shivered. “When we woke and you weren't there. They didn't say they'd sent you to the bowels of hell.”

Jyn grinned a little, startled, and didn't have the urge to rip her hand free, to jerk away from human contact. This was Bodhi. They weren't friends, not yet. Whatever threads connected her to him, the borrowed time they shared, it wasn't something as easy or simple as friendship. But, Jyn thought, maybe that's where she was wrong. Maybe it was friendship, she just hadn't known it could burn like this.

“Have you eaten?”

Bodhi shook his head, huddled a little tighter into his jacket, jaw locked. “I'm worried I'll crack my teeth.”

That flash of humor, the downward angle of his eyebrows, and Jyn shrugged to hide her amusement. The frayed, unraveled parts of Bodhi seemed to be reknitting. She could see the trauma lingering in the tightness of his eyes, the uncomfortable way he stood so far into the open, but she too, knew that trauma intimately.

“It's better than being cold and hungry. Come on, let's find you a jacket, and see about getting you some of the Tauntaun piss they’re calling caf around here.”

Bodhi frowned a little, falling into step next her. “What's a Tauntaun?”

Jyn patted his shoulder, only the slight jerkiness giving way to her unfamiliarity of the motion. It was less comfort than something bracing, but Bodhi straightened beneath it anyway. Just a little. She grinned, mouth curving just slightly upwards, and watched Bodhi from beneath her lashes.

“What's a frozen hell without a few creatures?” 

* * *

 There were ghosts on Hoth. Not terrible ones, for only stubborn things survived in this cold, and some nightmares had more sense. But the hallways were an endless loop and daylight was a blistering curse with its frozen sky. She thought having ghosts was fitting for a placed named Echo Base.

Jyn had named them - Baze, Chirrutt, and at her most uncharitable, K2. But that wasn't quite right, because it was K2 she found herself talking to most often inside her head, as she chipped away at ice. The droid who had become ingrained in her internal monologue.

_Would you like to know the odds of succeeding in digging this tunnel by hand?_

_Jyn Erso, you could remove fifteen percent more ice if you simply used proper equipment._

_Why would I haul ice? My joints would freeze._

Jyn didn't know what it meant that she found it easier to talk to the dead than the living. She never had before. She’d watched her mother die, had held her father as death rattled in his throat, and had stared silently at Saw’s death pyre of rock and ruin. They lingered at the hollow edges of her conscious sometimes, but it was Baze she expected to see in a shadow, and low murmur of a prayer that she rasped beneath her breath in between tired steps had never belonged to her.

Grief and guilt did strange things to a person’s mind, and she carried her weight in both.

She did her best to ignore the emptiness at her back, the cold line of her spine.

But Jyn realized that she was still adjusting to this strange thing of caring for the living as she watched Bodhi eye the gruel in front him with compressed lips and unsteady hands. The careful way he avoided looking directly at people, as if they'd know what he had been, left her fingers clenched on top of her thighs.  

She'd grown used to the odd stares, the watchfulness as she was given grunt task after another. She wasn't quite officially a rebel, and her family legacy was thick in the air here. Alderaan was a whisper, a jagged breath that never quite shook loose, and Jyn wondered if their ghosts could scream at her across the void too.

Not fast enough. Not soon enough. Millions and millions dead, with only a single, bitter hope that a single weakness could be exploited. That her father had not failed them.

At least here, she didn't have to look at the stars and wonder. If death came, she'd be blind to it.

But there was an edge to the mess now, and Jyn hated it. Chin set, she stared back, until people looked away. Without Bodhi, none of them would have the tiny flicker of hope they had, and this icy hell would certainly have been their tombs. If her presence reminded them of that, then so be it.

“Not everyone joins the Empire because they want too,” Bodhi said suddenly, chin jerking up, spoon clenched tightly between his fingers. “Not everyone _believes_.”

Jyn said nothing at first, because she wasn't certain what she could say. Her father had run and been caught, what chance did someone like Bodhi have? But here Bodhi sat, half frozen and stiff from injuries, lips tightly compressed, and so she tried.

“I know.”

He blinked, a ripple of something moving across his skin, and then he tucked himself beneath the curve of his shoulders and took a careful bite. The edges of his mouth twisted, and she might have smiled.

“You get used to it.”

Bodhi sighed. “Cassian said something like that. Medfood isn't better.”

Jyn attempted nonchalance, but her ability to breathe disappeared. Cassian. Cassian said. Emotion she couldn't name crawled into her lungs, her throat, until it nearly choked her. Struggling for her next breath, she managed it, but barely. “How is he?”

Her words were flat, the heavy strain nearly absent from her voice, but when Bodhi looked up, his eyes said she'd given enough away. Once, that might have bothered her, that she could be so easily read. But she found with Bodhi, she didn't mind as much.

“Alive,” Bodhi says carefully, swallowing. “His back..”

Jyn looked away, teeth clenched to stop her demands. Bodhi took another bite, stared intently at his gruel.

“He said to tell you not to worry.”

Her gaze darted back to his, teeth catching the tip of her tongue to stop her from letting words spill out. She tried not to think of the way his fall had echoed, each reverberating slam of Cassian’s body vibrating through her fingertips. The damage he'd wrought on himself, climbing after her, saving them both.

“The hospital was evacuated,” Bodhi said at last, catching her gaze. “Bacta tanks aren't easy to relocate…”

She sat still for several long moments, thinking through the things Bodhi didn't want to tell her. Somewhere, Cassian was struggling with injuries bad enough they'd kept him with the bacta tanks, even as the rebel base had moved fast to escape the possibility of the Death Star.

“Thank you,” Jyn says finally, pulse uneven in her ears.

Bodhi nodded and set about finishing his meal with quick urgency. “He was mad, you know.”

She blinked, arched both brows. “Who was?”

“Cassian,” he shoved his empty bowl away, grinned a little. “It's hard to tell, but when we found out you'd been sent here instead of put in the med bay, he was angry.”

It did something funny to her chest, knowing that Cassian had reacted to her absence and she licked chapped lips. “My injuries weren't as bad.”

A lopsided grin. “So we were told.”

Cassian hadn't cared. Ignoring that thought for later, she nodded towards the hallway. “You need to be somewhere?”

“They'll find me when they need me. You?”

“Back to digging,” she said with a shrug. Maybe the basic job should’ve frustrated her, but Jyn was used to manual labor. She was terrible at being still, and this gave her something to do. At least, that's what she told herself when the frustration and anger tightened her lungs and closed her throat.

She was a thief. She had no patience for orders she couldn't trust. Maybe Saw had seen that in her, all those years ago. But her life had been filled with other people’s hard choices and her own refusal to commit. What had she told Saw?

_It's easy if you don't look up._

Well, she was growing more comfortable with this crick in her neck every day, her eyes watching and assessing. She blamed Cassian, her father. Both had turned this fight into something personal, no longer could she allow it to be something abstract, a political thought.

_I’ve been in this fight since I was six years old._

But where did a girl who lived her life running fit into a rebellion? 

* * *

 Sometimes she dreamed of eerie green light. Of a terrible silence and roaring in the distance, as the horizon disappeared. What did a world sound like, when it died?

* * *

Captain Cassian Andor arrived at Echo Base on a wave of news. Hot and cold beneath her thick jacket, Jyn stared at him as he stepped carefully into the mess. In her ears was shouting, jumbled words she understood but couldn't process, fingers trembling.

Luke Skywalker.

Deathstar.

_Cassian was here._

He looked thin, still too pale, spine carefully straight as he looked towards her and Bodhi unerringly. As if he'd known where to find them. As if he'd expected they'd be here, impatiently waiting for him. Her lungs seized, eyes unblinking as they watched each other, relief and need a tangle in her chest.

Jyn had seen Cassian angry and determined. She'd faced him down when he wore both lies and truth on his face, had caught that rare curve of an almost smile when she surprised him. But the look behind his eyes as a cheering crowd separated them, it was _different_. It reminded her of before Scarif.

_Welcome home. I’m here._

It looked like a promise.

General Draven stood behind him, and impatiently motioned for them to continue down the hallway. Cassian’s mouth tightened at the corners, eyes dark and narrow as his jaw clenched for a single breath, but then he turned away. Jyn watched him move, nails digging into the table in front of her, breathing ragged.

Cassian. Alive and walking, and nothing about him spoke of rejection. Just that same, steady strength mingled with the need that lived beneath her fingertips. Whatever this was she wasn't alone, hadn't been alone since Yavin V and the strength of his fingers against hers.

He kept coming _back_.

Bodhi touched her hand, and her gaze darted to him. His eyes were bright, fingers trembling faintly against her own. “We did it.”

For a moment, Jyn didn't understand his words.  When she realized what he meant, she let it roll over her, the impact shockwaves of landing after a high fall. Her bones ached with it.

They'd won. They'd won. The Death Star was gone. Her father’s legacy was now tangled up with Luke Skywalker’s and the spacejunk the Death Star left behind. It's terrible legacy would be nothing but stardust one day, and it wouldn't be her.

Cassian was here.

Stepping forward, Jyn hugged Bodhi. He went stiff and uncertain, fingers jerky against her back. Then his grip tightened, body leaning towards her instead of away. They felt like jagged pieces of different puzzles, and Jyn didn't care.

“Papa would be proud of you,” she whispered into his shoulder.

Bodhi trembled, and something like liberation left her shaky. The burden of her childhood, her father's desperation were over. Whatever the future held for her, it would be one of her making, and she'd never tasted freedom so sweet.

* * *

The last person Jyn expected to meet roaming the halls was General Rieekan. She'd seen him of course, Echo Base was still too small for people to go unnoticed, but she'd never run across him alone. She remembered with a jolt that he was from Alderaan, and her throat tightened. She cursed the wild, nervous energy that had made it impossible to sleep, this unfamiliar need clawing at her guts.

She wasn’t certain what she'd hoped to find, although a tiny, vibrant thought ran along lines she couldn't allow herself to consider. Cassian would probably be busy for hours yet, and as much as she wished he'd find her, she wasn't certain he could. So she'd walked, until her ear and nose were numb, until she could almost breath past her jittery thoughts.

Now, she'd run into the General in charge of Echo Base. He stood with his head bowed, greying hair catching brightly on the artificial light, something about the quiet of his pose speaking of grief. His head lifted, before she could turn around, and sharp blue eyes studied her intently.

If the talk in the mess could be believed, this man had fought in the Clone Wars with distinction, before working to form the Alliance, his promotion to General new enough to shine.  Jyn was surprised, by how kind his face appeared. Saw had never worn his battles so lightly on his face, and neither had her father. But their was a bitter grief in his eyes, and as he watched her, Jyn wondered if he wore his scars on the inside, instead.

“Jyn Erso,” Rieekan said.

Swallowing, Jyn nodded. “Sir.”

A hint of amusement, as he turned in the direction she'd been headed, before she'd come across him. “Walk with me.”

Startled, Jyn did as she'd been bid, attempting to match his ground eating stride. He was silent for a long moments, before ushering her into a small room she had never entered. The door shut behind her, and the silence was noticeable, even for Hoth.

“My apologies, that I have not had time to speak with you before now,” Rieekan said as he sat on the edge of the desk, offering her a seat with a tilt of his chin. Jyn shook her head, and kept on her feet.

“Do you usually speak to stowaways?”

“I think we can both acknowledge that you are a special case,” he said simply. “But you will hardly be the first, after this victory you have won us.”

Her fingers curled, but she did her best to keep her face neutral. “I wasn't the only one.”

The General nodded, eyes steady. “Yes.”

Her next breath burned in her lungs, but she relished the pain, needed it to ground her. “I'd like to stay.”

“I'd hoped you would,” he replied. “You and your men made it possible to strike a powerful blow against the Empire, one we desperately needed. The loss of Alderaan could have been the end of us.”

Jyn lowered her eyes, stomach tight and knotted. Her men. She'd accepted the guilt of it, the self flagellation that her dreams brought, and it left her nearly sick to take some sort of credit for it. But perhaps one day it would sit less harshly in her gut, until she could accept the quiet thanks given. It helped, that Skywalker had capitalized on what they'd given him, and perhaps left her ghosts less restless.

Maybe one day, she'd have the chance to thank him.

Still, she'd known destroying the Death Star would be a beginning, not an end. She'd seen it in Cassian’s face. A fight that had been brewing for years had just begun.

“The Empire will strike back and it will strike back hard. We can expect a great deal of fighting in the future. Echo Base is as of now, a secret. But all secrets are eventually uncovered, and the Empire now knows to look,” Rieekan said into the silence, voice weary for the first time.

Jyn had seen some suggestions of it already. Rushing intelligence officers, cutting through celebrations with grim mouths. The Outer Rims were going to become far more dangerous than they were even now. Resistant forces like Saw’s would either be crushed or would flock to the newly empowered Alliance. With one blow, the Rebellion had become real and the Emperor would respond in kind.

“Why tell me this?” She asked finally.

“I never knew Saw Guerrero personally, Sergeant Erso, but I knew his reputation. What he was capable of pulling out of people,” Rieekan watched her, eyes steady. “Others may doubt that, but I do not. I'm sorry to say that your actions have not warranted you as many friends as they should, but it has garnered respect.”

The use of Sergeant rattled her, although Jyn did her best to hide it. As if the rank and position had merely been waiting on her to step forward, and take it. Swallowing, she pushed that aside and considered the rest of his statement.

Jyn thought of General Draven.

Cassian’s superior was not the enemy, but she doubted they were on the same side. Not after Eadu. She would not find a friend with that General, and Jyn did not want one.

“We have three years worth of work here that I need done in two, and I find you digging tunnels a waste of talent,” Rieekan continued. “We are lacking in resources, Erso, and securing them must be done in utmost secret.”

For a moment, she thought of refusing. Of asking to be sent into the fight, to walk away from what was being built in secret. Chewing on her cheek, she forced herself to consider the veiled offer. She'd spent her life, running from place to place, hiding. She'd never been given the chance to decide if building was something that she wanted to do.

She thought of Cassian, his carefully straight posture and dark eyes. Bodhi, with his cautious bravery and insistence that not everyone wished to serve the Empire. Of her father and Saw, two cogs of something she was still trying to understand.

“I don't sit still well,” Jyn said, letting all the other bits of pieces of her concern wash through her tone. “I'm not sure I know how.”

A hint of a smile on the General's face. “We’re at war, Sergeant. I think you'll be surprised at how little time you'll have.” 


End file.
